Introducing this work

For the purposes of this Scoop.it site, the history of human interaction with information may be divided into 4 eras. The first (spoken) era ended with the invention of writing around 3000-4000 BC. The second era ended with the invention of the printing press in 1440. The third era ended, and the fourth began, with the invention of the Internet (depending how one defines its operational beginning) somewhere between 1969 and 1982. We now exist early, but decidedly, in the fourth era.

All readers may not agree with this interpretation of the history of information, especially with the division and numbering of the eras. That is not the main point. Rather, it is that humankind is presently existing in an era distinctly different from the one that preceded it -- that in fact, this new era is accompanied with, and characterized by, a new - and quite different - information landscape. This new Internet information landscape will challenge, disrupt, and overpower the print-oriented one that came before it. It will not completely obliterate that which preceded it, but it will render it to a subsidiary, rather than primary, level of influence.

Just as the printing press altered humanity's relationship with information, thereby resulting in massive restructuring of political, religious, economic, social, educational, cultural, scientific, and other realms of life; so too will the Internet occasion analogous transformations in the corresponding universe of present and future human activity.

This site will concern itself primarily with how K-20 education in the US, and the people who comprise its constituencies, may be affected by this transformative movement from one era to the next. All ideas considered here appear, to me at least, to impact the learning enterprise in some way. Accordingly, this work looks at the present and the future through a lens that is predominantly, but far from entirely, a digital one. -JL

Opinions expressed, scooped, or copied in this Scoop.it topic are my choice, and are in no way to be connected with my employer.

"We are teachers at Science Park High School in Newark, New Jersey, and we are deeply disturbed by the thirty days of disruption being forced on our school. In the coming weeks, like the rest of New Jersey, we will be forced to administer the PARCC exam. A few weeks ago we saw the schedule: three weeks of testing in March, followed by three weeks of testing in May. This total does not include the additional week of make-up testing following each of the three-week periods. This total does not include the days of mandatory test preparation to familiarize students with the exam’s very specific computer interface. This total does not include the thousands of hours of training of teachers and administrators to plan, schedule, and execute this exam. We honestly believe that The State of New Jersey, by forcing us to administer this time-devouring test, is engaged in behavior destructive to the educational well being of our students."

A while back, I was asked, "What engages students?" Sure, I could respond, sharing anecdotes about what I believed to be engaging, but I thought it would be so much better to lob that question to my own eighth graders. The responses I received from all 220 of them seemed to fall under 10 categories, representing reoccurring themes that appeared again and again. So, from the mouths of babes, here are my students' answers to the question: "What engages students?"

Jim Lerman's insight:

Excellent observations for we educators, from our students, about how to engage them in their own learning. Most of this article is direct quotes from 8th graders.

"Following months of anticipation and speculation, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) recently published regulations for teacher preparation programs under Title II of the Higher Education Act. These proposed federal regulations would require states to rate teacher preparation at one of four levels—exceptional, effective, at-risk, or low-performing—based on certain indicators of quality, such as student learning, employment, and survey outcomes. Programs labeled as at-risk or low-performing would be barred from receiving TEACH grants, which are distributed to graduates who agree to serve in high-need fields or schools and represent an important source of federal funding for colleges and schools of education.

"To help our readers further assess this issue and gauge the key differences between the DOE’s proposed regulations and CAEP standards, Eduventures analyzed the thousands of submitted comments. Five overarching themes emerged:"

Call for online Makerspace resources

I'm happy to announce that I have just been appointed Director of the brand new Possibility Zone Makerspace at Kean University. This is part of a long-term grant and will have a focus on STEM students and professors and the preparation of pre-service K-12 STEM teachers.

As part of the project, I plan to start a new Scoop.it topic on Makerspaces very soon. I'm looking for blogs, websites, wikis, videos, ezines, ebooks, paper.li feeds, etc. that deal with Makerspaces and things related to them. Basically, I want to set up an information flow to curate.

If you have an idea or resource for me to check out, could you please send it? I think a helpful way would be to use the "Reactions" link that appears on the bottom left of this Scoop.it window when you mouse over it. (If you're reading this, it's likely that you can see it now.) Please be sure to include URLs in your suggestions.

Thank you so much for your help. I'm really looking forward to this new opportunity and hope to be of assistance to others through the new topic here on Scoop.it.

Sincerely,

Jim Lerman

PS - The photo is not of our Makerspace at Kean, but one at the Cincinnati Public Library. We have just started to create /design our space. What fun!

"Hundreds of students fill the seats, but the lecture hall stays quiet enough for everyone to hear each cough and crumpling piece of paper. The instructor speaks from a podium for nearly the entire 80 minutes. Most students take notes. Some scan the Internet. A few doze.

"In a nearby hall, an instructor, Catherine Uvarov, peppers students with questions and presses them to explain and expand on their answers. Every few minutes, she has them solve problems in small groups. Running up and down the aisles, she sticks a microphone in front of a startled face, looking for an answer. Students dare not nod off or show up without doing the reading.

"Both are introductory chemistry classes at the University of California campus here in Davis, but they present a sharp contrast — the traditional and orderly but dull versus the experimental and engaging but noisy. Breaking from practices that many educators say have proved ineffectual, Dr. Uvarov’s class is part of an effort at a small but growing number of colleges to transform the way science is taught."

While it’s not uncommon to hear students say “I hate school,” some are really suffering and desperately want out.

I can relate.

I became an educator not because I loved school, but because I was bored and miserable in school. I wanted to figure out how to change that for others. I started this blog to share ideas about how to do that.

Like my own experience, many students today are bored and disengaged for many hours each day, despite the best efforts of their teachers and parents to try to help them make the most of school. Many are depressed. They feel a complete lack of control over their lives, and have a bleak view of the future.

Jim Lerman's insight:

This seems like a good idea to me. Please read on and contribute if the concept resonates with you. Also, please pass along to your network, if you can.

The solution for education is that schools disappear? Well no longer an option, but what I see most viable and relevant is that the school (Students, Teachers and Parents) are processed. Some may say, that is not possible need help from outside, I replied already hit bottom and from inside the school is feasible to begin the transformation.

NMC and EDUCUASE release the 2015 Horizon Report, outlining 18 trends in higher-ed technology over the next 1 to 5 years.“Makerspaces” will gain traction long before adaptive learning; and improving digital literacy is a breeze compared to determining how to reward educators for teaching.

These are just two of the findings released as part of the New Media Consortium’s (NMC) 2015 Higher Education Horizon Report, jointly conducted with the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. The Report charts the five-year horizon for the impact of emerging technology in learning around the world.

Jim Lerman's insight:

Useful summary of the 2015 Horizon Report for Higher Ed. Good links on the second page to expand on each item listed.

The nation’s colleges are "enmeshed in a jungle of red tape," faced with federal regulations that are complicated, costly, and often confusing, according to a new report by a Congressional task force.

The report, produced by the American Council on Education, concludes that too many federal rules are "unnecessarily voluminous and too often ambiguous," with "unreasonable" compliance costs. It calls for regulatory relief for colleges and an improved process for developing new rules.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the Senate education committee, said the report’s recommendations would guide his panel’s efforts to "weed the garden" in the forthcoming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act and "allow colleges to spend more of their time and money educating students, instead of filling out mountains of paperwork."

To test the hypothesis that lecturing maximizes learning and course performance, we metaanalyzed 225 studies that reported data on examination scores or failure rates when comparing student performance in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses under traditional lecturing versus active learning. The effect sizes indicate that on average, student performance on examinations and concept inventories increased by 0.47 SDs under active learning (n = 158 studies), and that the odds ratio for failing was 1.95 under traditional lecturing (n = 67 studies). These results indicate that average examination scores improved by about 6% in active learning sections, and that students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail than were students in classes with active learning. Heterogeneity analyses indicated that both results hold across the STEM disciplines, that active learning increases scores on concept inventories more than on course examinations, and that active learning appears effective across all class sizes—although the greatest effects are in small (n ≤ 50) classes. Trim and fill analyses and fail-safe n calculations suggest that the results are not due to publication bias. The results also appear robust to variation in the methodological rigor of the included studies, based on the quality of controls over student quality and instructor identity. This is the largest and most comprehensive metaanalysis of undergraduate STEM education published to date. The results raise questions about the continued use of traditional lecturing as a control in research studies, and support active learning as the preferred, empirically validated teaching practice in regular classrooms.

"The flipped learning model of instruction has begun to make the transition from an educational buzzword to a normative practice among many university instructors, and with good reason. Flipped learning provides many benefits for both faculty and students. However, instructors who use flipped learning soon find out that a significant amount of work is sometimes necessary to win students over to this way of conducting class. Even when the benefits of flipped learning are made clear to students, some of them will still resist. And to be fair, many instructors fail to listen to what students are really saying.

"Most student “complaints” about flipped learning conceal important questions about teaching and learning that are brought to the surface because of the flipped environment. Here are three common issues raised by students and the conversation-starters they afford."

"U.S. Department of Education data claiming only 41% of students who start college finish is not accurate, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The center studied data on freshmen entering college in 2008 and found the completion rate to be 55.03% when they considered students who graduated from a different college from where they first enrolled. The federal numbers do not track transfers."

The call to reexamine what teachers teach can bring renewed discussions of how. With tools like augmented reality, games, and coding, it’s possible to imagine a model of schooling that departs from its behaviorist past—creating a Ludic Education for a Ludic Age, promoting inquiry, collaboration, experimentation, and play. In this vision, teachers and students are partners in a joint venture. They open up the Teaching Machine to peer into its guts and gears—tinkering, failing, and trying again, to see what they can make of it together. The machines can return education to what it’s always been: a project that’s intrinsically human.

Is being a Luddite really that bad? I think of this as someone who questions the way technology, including digital technologies, is used. If it oppressive use, then we should not use it. We seem to have lost sight of the need to care and support teachers and students in their classroom roles.

"I've been working on a book for a while now called Teaching Machinesthat explores the history of education technology in the twentieth century. And this year I've started a series on my blog, Hack Education, that also documents some of this lost or forgotten history. (I've looked at the origins of multiple choice tests and multiple choice testing machines, the parallels between the "Draw Me" ads and for-profit correspondence schools of the 1920s and today's MOOCs, and the development of one of my personal favorite pieces of ed-tech, the Speak & Spell.) See, I'm exhausted by the claims by the latest batch of Silicon Valley ed-tech entrepreneurs and their investors that ed-tech is "new" and that education -- I'm quoting from the New York Times here -- "is one of the last industries to be touched by Internet technology." Again, this is a powerful and purposeful re-telling and revising of history designed to shape the direction of the future."

"The surprising death last week of New York Times mediareporter David Carr was upsetting for many reasons, one of which I didn’t expect until after reading his obituary. Carr had recently begun teaching a media studies course at Boston University. His syllabus is at once a model for best online learning practices, 21st century research skills, and real world rules for digital etiquette in the classroom."

Quote from Kevin Hogan's into to the Tech & Learning email newsletter, dated Feb. 18, 2015. They syllabus is fascinating to read and its reading assignments are terrific.-JL

"U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wants to take President Barack Obama's free community-college plan a step further and provide free tuition to freshmen and sophomores at every public college and university. Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, also is proposing lowering interest rates for student loans."

"Craig Lambert notes the connections between a growth mindset and maker movement in a blog post he wrote for the Maker Faire Atlanta.

"I’m aware that many, if not all, Makers seem to hold the growth mindset. They relish challenges, they want to stretch themselves, they want to try and do things that they have never done before. In fact, it seems that what we really need as a human race is a whole lot more people with the growth mindset in order to tackle and overcome the many challenges we face. "

The increasing complexity of the world in which we live and work requires us to be more sophisticated in how we learn. We must be better prepared to learn on demand, with minimum disruption to our workflow and productivity. With this goal in mind, it is increasingly critical that the resources we put in place to help us learn—and ultimately perform—be as direct, effective, and instantly available as possible.

To accomplish this, we must move away from individual, siloed, “one-off” solutions to an ecosystem comprised of multi-faceted learning and performance options that enhance the environments in which we work and learn.

This complimentary white paper, by Marc J. Rosenberg and Steve Foreman, explores learning and performance ecosystems from conceptual, technological, cultural, and managerial perspectives, and looks into how this new framework will dramatically impact the ways in which people learn and work. It lays a foundation for further discussion, experimentation, and innovation into new ways to leverage all that we know about learning to improve workforce performance.

Building effective successful social media components into university courses is not a deep mystery. People are going to respond like people, online or in-person. For example, the challenges that show up when trying to get an engaging discussion going — especially one which involves more than a few particularly outgoing students — will present themselves whether that discussion lives on an electronic platform or in a traditional classroom. Here are some tips for making social media an effective part of your tool set:

"Officials at a Pennsylvania elementary school say that test scores at the once-struggling school have soared following a decision three years ago to adopt a hybrid learning model, in which teachers blend high-tech learning and small group instruction. Officials now are planning to pilot the approach at another low-performing school."

As always I do this by looking through eLearning Learning and related sites like Communities and Networks Connection. I looked at Virtual Classroom, Distance Learning, ILT, Teaching Distance Learning. I also did some quick searches for various kinds of things and added them into eLearning Learning (via delicious). So together, I’ve collected a bunch of resources pretty quickly. That said, there’s so much already out there on this – I’m at this point not quite sure what the real question was/is. Certainly a lot of this is already findable. I hope this is useful. But I think the problem at this point might be something else. Still here are 60 great resources.

n November 2011 I was taking one of the first MOOCs from Stanford. At that time, many new MOOCs were being announced and I started Class Central as a way to keep track of them and figure out what I should take next. The website gathers course listings through provider sites, social media, and tips from MOOC providers and users. The figures below are based on these data.

At TechCrunch Disrupt this year, Coursera Co-Founder Daphne Koller claimed that 2014 is the year MOOCs will come of age. An ecosystem has now developed around MOOCs: hundreds of people employed full-time (the big three--Coursera, Udacity and edX--employ more than a hundred people each), thousands of people involved in the creation of MOOCs, many millions in funding, and, importantly, millions in revenue.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.